Book excerpt: This book initiates a new digital multimedia standards series. The purpose of the series is to make information about digital multimedia standards readilyavailable. Both tutorial and advanced topics will be covered in the series, often in one book. Our hope is that users will find the series helpful in deciding what standards to support and use while implementors will d- cover a wealth of technical details that help them implement those standards correctly. In today's global economy standards are increasingly important. Yet until a standard is widely used, most of the benefits of standardization are not realized. We hope that standards committee chairpeople will organize and encourage a book in this series devoted to their new standard. This can be a forum to share and preserve some ofthe “why” and “how” that went into the development of the standard and, in the process, assist in the rapid adoption of the standard. Already in production for this series are books titled Digital Video: - troduction to MPEG-2 and Data Compression in Digital Systems.